German Concentration Camps Factual Survey

The Jewish International Film Festival (JIFF) will present the Sydney premiere screenings of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey at Event Cinemas, Bondi Junction from 19-20 August. These special sessions will be preceded by the film’s Australian premiere at the upcoming Melbourne International Film Festival.

Described by critics as “an impressive and important piece of filmmaking, restored with intelligence and care by the Imperial War Museum (IWM)”, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey includes newly restored and digitised footage, in addition to the inclusion of the missing sixth reel, assembled by the IWM according to the original shot list.

In 1944 and 1945, Allied cameramen documented the horrors discovered as Europe was liberated from the Nazis. So powerful and damning was the footage, that Allied propagandists quickly determined that it should be screened in Germany after the fall of the Third Reich, and shown to German prisoners of war wherever they were held.

As Producer of the film at Britain’s Ministry of Information in 1945, Sydney Bernstein assembled a small, distinguished and expert team to work on the project, including Alfred Hitchcock and Australian writer Colin Wills. Progress was slow so the ambitious but unfinished work was shelved in the autumn of 1945. Nearly seven decades later, this milestone in documentary cinema is finally complete, and can be viewed in its intended form.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the film is: “A time capsule, as much as a direct historical document, showing not only what the Allied Forces found when they first arrived at the Nazi concentration camps, but also the importance the British government of the time placed on communicating the reality of the Nazi atrocities.”